Osho on Intuition
When your unconscious and conscious meet because there is nothing repressed in the unconscious — and that is the moment of their meeting and their merger. At that very moment another great opportunity opens up for you because you are no longer involved with the lower; your whole energy is available for the higher. You are in the middle, the conscious mind.
But because the unconscious is there, you remain involved in repressing it, you go on repressing it. It is not a question that once you have repressed it you are finished with it; you have to repress it constantly, because it is coming up again and again. It is just like bouncing a ball; you hit it and it comes back to you. The greater force you put into hitting it, the greater is the force with which it comes towards you. The same is the situation with instincts; you repress them, and the more energy you put in repressing, the more energy they will have coming back to you. From where can they get energy? It is your energy. But when you are completely free from the unconscious and its involvements, it is clean and silent; then your whole energy is available.
Energy has a fundamental principle about it: it cannot remain static, it has to move. Movement is its nature. It is not a thing that you put somewhere and it remains there. No, it has to move — it is life. So when there is no reason to move downwards, it has only one way to move — upwards. There is nowhere else to go. It starts hitting your superconscious and its hit to the superconscious are so pleasant and such a joy that all your sexual orgasms simply pale.
You cannot imagine it because it is not a quantitative difference such that I can tell you that it is ten thousand times greater in quantity. The difference is of quality. So there is no way to imagine it. How to compare it to your sexual orgasm? But that is the only thing in your life through which something higher can be indicated. When your energy starts hitting your upper world, of which you were not even aware up to now there is a constant showering of joy. The sexual orgasm is so momentary that by the time you know it is there, it is gone. You only remember it in memory; you don’t really realize when it is there.
Because of this momentariness you become more and more addicted to it, because you remember there was something, something great was happening, so, “Let us go into it again, let us go into it again.” But there is no way….Before it comes — you know it is coming because the bell starts ringing in your head. It is really a bell which starts ringing in your head: it is coming. You know that it is coming… you know that it is gone. The bell has stopped, it is not ringing any more, and you look like a fool! Between the ringing of the bell and the stopping of the bell, you look like a fool. Perhaps man feels more ashamed; that’s why after making love he simply turns and goes to sleep. Woman is not that much ashamed for the simple reason that she is not an active partner; the man looks foolish because he is the active partner.
Just the energy touching your higher level of consciousness, the superconscious — just the touch, and there is a shower of joy which continues. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You have nothing to do: your work is finished when you have stopped repressing and you have cleaned your unconscious. Then you have nothing to do; then all that has to be done is done by your energy. And when you reach the center a new faculty starts functioning in you which is intuition. At the center of the unconscious is instinct. At the center of the conscious is intellect. At the center of the superconscious is intuition. Instinct makes you do things, forces you to do things even against your will. Intellect helps you to find ways if you want to do a certain thing, or to find ways if you don’t want to do a certain thing. Intellect’s function is to find a way.
If you want to go with the instinct, intellect will find a way.
If you are a so-called religious person, a pseudo-religious person, and you want to go against your instinct, intellect will find a way. They may be strange ways, but intellect is at your service: whatever you want it will do. It is not in favor of or against anything, it is simply at your disposal. If a man is sane he will use his intellect to help his unconscious be fulfilled. The sooner it is fulfilled the better, so that you are free from it. Fulfillment means freedom from it. If you are some kind of crackpot, Catholic, Protestant, any kind — there are all sorts of crackpots available in the world. You can choose what kind of crackpot you want to be: Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist — all kinds of varieties are available. You cannot say, “The variety I want is not available,” you cannot say that. In thousands of years man has created almost every single variety of crackpot. You can choose, you can have your choice; but whatever you choose it is the same. Nobody has told you how to use intellect to fulfill your unconscious, your nature, your biology, your chemistry. They are yours. What does it matter whether it is chemistry or biology or physiology? They are part of you and nature never gives anything without reason. Fulfill it, and its fulfillment is going to make a path for the higher potential.
All religious people are hung up with the lowest part of their being — that’s why they look so sad and so guilty. They cannot rejoice. Jesus goes on saying to these people, “Rejoice,” and on the other hand he goes on saying to them, “Remember hell.” He is creating a dilemma for people, showing them the way to hell — the way to hell is to fulfill your nature and the way to heaven is to go against your nature. But to go against your nature creates hell here on earth. I want to create paradise here, now. Why postpone such a good thing? Things which are not worth your attention you can postpone — but paradise? I am not ready to postpone it for tomorrow or for the next second. You can have it herenow. All that you need is a clean unconscious: fulfilled, contented, biology settles; chemistry settles and gives you all the energy that was involved in those planes. The energy shoots upwards by itself, and it stops only at the very center of your superconscious mind. And there intuition starts functioning.
“What is intuition?” you have asked. Intuition is in some ways like instinct, in some ways absolutely unlike instinct; in some ways like intellect, in other ways absolutely against intellect. So you will have to understand, because it is the subtlest thing in you. Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it. It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. You cannot do anything about your instinct and you cannot do anything about your intuition. But just as you can allow your instincts to be fulfilled, you can allow and give total freedom to your intuition to be fulfilled. And you will be surprised at what kinds of powers you have been carrying within you. Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions — not verbally but existentially. You need not ask, What is truth? Instinct won’t hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can’t see.
Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth — there is no question of thinking about it. Instinct and intuition are both independent of you. Instinct is in the power of nature, of unconscious nature, and intuition is in the hands of the superconscious universe, the consciousness that surrounds the whole universe, the oceanic consciousness of which we are just small islands — or better, icebergs, because we can melt into it and become one with it.
In some ways intuition is exactly opposite to instinct. Instinct always leads you to the other; its fulfillment is always dependent on something other than you. Intuition leads you only to yourself. It has no dependence, no need for the other; hence its beauty, its freedom and independence. Intuition is an exalted state needing nothing. It is so full of itself that there is no space for anything else.
In some way intuition is like intellect because it is intelligence. Intellect and intelligence are similar at least in appearance, but only in appearance. The intellectual person is not necessarily intelligent and the intelligent person is not necessarily intellectual. You can find a farmer so intelligent that even a very great professor, a very great intellectual, will look a pygmy in front of him.
It happened in Soviet Russia after the revolution, that they changed Petrograd, the city of Petrograd, to make it a new city named after Lenin, Leningrad. In front of Petrograd’s huge, beautiful, and ancient castle there was a big rock which the czars had never thought to remove — there was no need. Now cars had come into existence and that rock was blocking the whole road, it had to be removed. But the rock was so beautiful that they wanted to remove it and keep it as a memorial, so they did not want to destroy it or dynamite it. But all the great engineers — all they could think about was to dynamite it or to start cutting it up piece by piece and then later on to put the pieces together. But Lenin said, “That won’t do — that will not be the same thing. The rock is so beautiful, that’s why the czars have kept it just in front of their palace.”
At that point a man came, a poor man on his donkey. He stood there listening to all this argument; then he laughed and started moving on. Lenin said, “Wait, why did you laugh?”
He said, “It is such a simple matter. Nothing much has to be done: all that you have to do is to dig around the rock. Don’t touch the rock at all; just dig around the rock and the rock will settle deeper into the hole. You will not be disturbing the rock — the rock will remain there — but it will not be blocking anybody. There is no need to dynamite it or to destroy it.”
Lenin said to his engineers, “You are great engineers and architects, but what this poor fellow is saying is more intelligent.” And that’s what was done. The rock was saved and the road was saved, but the idea came from a poor man who was nobody.
I have watched it, meeting thousands of people, that mostly, intellectual people are not intelligent because they don’t have to be intelligent; their intellect, their knowledge is enough. But a man who has no knowledge, no intellect and no education has to find some intelligence within himself; he cannot look outside. And because he has to depend on intelligence, intelligence starts growing. So intuition has something similar to intellect but it is not intellectual. It is intelligence. The functioning of intellect and intelligence is totally different. Intellect functions through steps, step by step. It has a procedure, a methodology. If you are doing a question in mathematics then there are steps to be followed.
In India there is a woman, Shakuntala, who is still alive and who has been around the world, in almost all the universities, exhibiting her intuition. She is not a mathematician, she is not even much educated — just a matriculate. Even when Albert Einstein was alive she was giving her demonstration in front of him. And her demonstration was strange. She would sit with a chalk in her hand before the board: you would ask any kind of question about mathematics or arithmetic, and you would not have even finished the question and she would have started writing the answer. Albert Einstein gave her a certificate — she showed the certificate to me when I was in Madras where she lives. She showed me all her certificates, and the one from Albert Einstein says, “I asked this woman a question which I take three hours to solve because I have to follow a whole method; I cannot just jump from the question to the answer. I know that nobody can do it in less time than I can, and that is three hours. Others may take even six hours hours or more, but I can do it in three hours because I have done it before. But the whole procedure has to be followed. If you miss even a single step….” The figures were so big that it took the whole board for her to write the answer. And before he had even finished the question, she started writing the answer.
He was puzzled, absolutely puzzled because it was impossible. He asked, “How do you do it?”
She said, “I don’t know how I do it — it simply happens. You ask me and figures start appearing before my eyes, somewhere inside. I can see 1, 2, 3, and I just go on writing.” That woman was born with her intuition functioning, but I felt really sad for her because she became just an exhibition. Nobody cared that a woman who is born with intuition functioning can become enlightened very easily. She is just standing on the border; one step and she becomes the ultimate in consciousness. But she is not aware because this is just some freak of nature.
There was another boy, Shankaran, who used to pull a rickshaw in the city. There was a professor of mathematics, an Englishman, who used to go in his rickshaw to the university. Once or twice it happened that he was thinking about some problem, and the boy simply looked at him and said, “This is the answer.” The professor had not spoken — he was simply thinking — and the boy was pulling the rickshaw, but he said, “This is the answer.”
The professor went to the university, worked out the whole process and was surprised that that was the answer. When it happened two or three times, he asked the boy, “How do you do it?”
He said, “I don’t do anything. I just feel you behind me, worried, and some figures start appearing. I am not much educated but figures I can understand. And I see so many figures in your mind, just behind me — a line, a queue — and then suddenly a few figures appear in my mind, so I tell you that this is the answer. I don’t know how it happens.”
Shankaran was sent by the professor to Oxford, because he was even more advanced than this woman, Shakuntala. You have to ask her the question, then she can write; with Shankaran you just had to visualize the question in your mind and he would write the answer His intuition was functioning more fully, he was seeing both the answer and he was seeing the question — he could read your mind. And he was even more illiterate, so poor a man that he was pulling a rickshaw. He became a phenomenon in himself in the history of mathematics because many questions which had remained unsolved for centuries, he solved — although he could not say how. He gave the answer, but how to judge whether the answer was right or wrong? It took many years. When a higher mathematics was developed, then they could work it out. Shankaran was dead but his answers were right.
Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things which you have never even thought of as things — for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things. In my religion intuition holds the highest place. That’s where I am trying to push you. An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; and the way to clean it is to satisfy it, to satisfy it so much that it starts telling you, “Please stop! It is more than I needed.” Only leave it then. And with that, your intellect is filled with such a fresh flow of energy that it turns into intelligence. Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things. Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities — much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential.
And once your intuition starts functioning, you are for the first time really a man. With the unconscious you are animal. With the conscious you are no longer animal. With the superconscious you are man. I love to quote a Baul mystic, Chandidas, because that man, in a simple statement, has condensed my whole religion: Sabar upar manus satya; tahar upar nahin. ‘Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing’. This man, Chandidas, must have been an authentically religious man. He is denying God, he is denying anything above human flowering: Sabar upar ‘above all, above everything’; Manus satya ‘the truth of man’; Tahar upar nahin ‘and beyond that I have traveled long — there is nothing’. Once you have reached to your human potential in its total flowering, you have arrived home.
Source:
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.
Discourse Series: From Misery to Enlightenment
Chapter #4
Chapter title: Above all, the truth of man — beyond that, nothing
1 February 1985 pm in Lao Tzu Grove
References:
Osho has spoken on ‘intuition, intelligence, consciousness, seer, energy’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- Ancient Music in the Pines
- I Am That
- Sat Chit Anand
- Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 2
- Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4, 5, 8
- Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 1
- The Transmission of the Lamp
- Beyond Enlightenment
- The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
- From Bondage to Freedom
- Guida Spirituale
- The Secret
- Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance
- Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
- The Psychology of the Esoteric
